Lootens joined the ELM committee a few years after it was founded in 1975 by Midwest prairie expert Dr. Betz, of Northeastern Illinois University. Betz was the first person to suggest restoring the agricultural land back to prairie. "At first, we all thought the idea was crazy," said Lootens. "Soon, though, it was easy to see the value. It's amazing to think that we are re-creating what the settlers saw when they came here, and passing that legacy to future generations." Lootens grew up on part of the land that is now Fermilab; his family lived on a dairy farm near Kirk and Wilson Roads. "As children we loved to play in these woods," he said. "But there were always cows grazing beside the forest stands, so I didn't really understand the value of the prairie until Betz came along." Prairie restoration is still a major goal of ELM--from prairie burns to seed harvests--but the project has expanded to include marshland, savannah and forest stands.

Lootens' successor at ELM is cryogenics engineer and butterfly expert Tom Peterson, a committee member since 1999. Peterson says that he feels honored to hold such an important position, if not intimidated by Lootens' years of experience. "Bob has a unique connection to this land," said Peterson. "His knowledge of the plants and animals here is unsurpassed." Peterson and Lootens say they look forward to working together closely in the coming years, and Peterson is excited about his new role. "Fermilab is a 6,800-acre island of nature surrounded by developed land," said Peterson. "Our neighbors appreciate the open space; our stewardship of this land is one of Fermilab's contributions to the Chicago area. I'm honored to have a role in that."
— Siri Steiner

"MGRID was founded to research what it would take to pull a campus cyber-infrastructure together," said Tom Finholt, MGRID's director. "MGRID is now branching out into other forms. We're exploring the best ways to use advanced network technology and our 10-gigabit optical links to Chicago, such as high-definition videoconferencing."

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The physical sciences are strongly favoured in President Bush's 2007 budget request — but researchers can't count their chickens yet.

President George W. Bush's State of the Union address on 31 January has been widely reviewed as an uninspiring compendium of small things. But for those directly involved, some of these small things are highly meaningful. For US physicists, the president's public embrace of their work, and his pledge to double funding for it over the next decade, is arguably the best news in the 13 years since the discipline reeled from the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider in Texas in 1993.

Bush's unexpected embrace of physics was confirmed in the budget request that he sent to Congress earlier this week. The Department of Energy's Office of Science, which supports the bulk of physics research in the United States, will receive an overall budget increase of 14%, should Congress accept Bush's proposal. Its high-energy physics programme will grow by 8% and its nuclear-physics programme (which funds basic research into atomic nuclei) expands by a spectacular 24%. The National Science Foundation, which supports most non-biomedical research at US universities, also obtains a healthy 8% increase.

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